For years, top brass in the sheriff’s department have abdicated their constitutional obligation to maintain humane conditions inside the jail, and Baca himself has stone-walled persistent efforts by the ACLU to bring the horrors that occur regularly behind the jail’s closed doors into daylight.

As Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project, put it to the New York Times, “The time has long passed when Baca could be the positive agent of change. We’ve been bringing these problems to him for years, and it should have been overwhelmingly obvious to him. What he’s doing now is running for cover.”

But this will also take action by the Obama administration. We need the hammer of a federal injunction. A completely independent monitor needs to be appointed by a federal judge, someone with the authority to track down the root causes of the longstanding culture of deputy violence in the jails and who can implement and carry out a plan to fix what ails the largest jail system in the nation.